1980 Summer Olympics boycott

[2] The Western governments first considered the idea of boycotting the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics in response to the situation in Afghanistan at the 20 December 1979 meeting of NATO representatives.

However, this idea gained popularity in early January 1980 when Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov called for a boycott.

On 14 January 1980, the Administration of President Jimmy Carter joined Sakharov's appeal and set a deadline by which the Soviet Union had to pull out of Afghanistan or "face the consequences", including an international boycott of the games.

On 26 January 1980, Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark announced that Canada, like the US, would boycott the Olympic Games if Soviet forces did not leave Afghanistan by 20 February 1980.

[5] When the deadline passed a month later without any change to the situation in Central Asia, Carter pushed U.S. allies to pull their Olympic teams from the upcoming games.

[9] In an attempt to save the Games, Lord Killanin, then president of the IOC, arranged to meet and discuss the boycott with Jimmy Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, before the new 24 May deadline.

[10] The IOC protested, claiming that the "pressures by the US and other supporting countries for the boycott were an inappropriate means to achieve a political end, and the victims of this action would be the athletes.

An African representative at the Bilderberg meeting voiced a different view: whether there was additional support outside the US or not, he believed a boycott would be an effective symbolic protest and be dramatically visible to those within the Soviet Union.

[14][15] Boxer Muhammad Ali traveled to Tanzania, Nigeria, and Senegal to unsuccessfully convince their leaders to join the boycott.

[22][23] Spain, Italy, Sweden, Iceland and Finland, although the latter under a heavy Russian influence at the time, were other principal nations representing western Europe at the Games.

[9] Four competitors (including one athlete) from New Zealand competed independently and marched under their NOC flag because the government officially supported the boycott.

[41] In April 1981, a Federal District court in Manhattan approved the settlement of two suits involving more than 9,000 Americans who were seeking refunds of payments they had made for trips to the Olympics that were canceled in wake of the boycott.